Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, wader, Doctor RJ, rfall, annetteboardman and Man Oh Man with guest editor Chitown Kev. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00AM Eastern Time. Special thanks to JekyllnHyde for the OND banner. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Special thanks to JekylinHyde for the OND banner.
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The Guardian
David Bowie, the iconic rock star whose career spanned more than half a century and whose influence transcended music, fashion and sexuality, has died aged 69.
The singer’s death was confirmed in a Facebook post on his official page: “David Bowie died peacefully today surrounded by his family after a courageous 18-month battle with cancer. While many of you will share in this loss, we ask that you respect the family’s privacy during their time of grief.”
Writing on Twitter, Bowie’s son, the film director Duncan Jones, 44, said: “Very sorry and sad to say it’s true.” The news came as a shock to some, who were initially sceptical, but Bowie’s publicist, Steve Martin, told the Reuters news agency: “It’s not a hoax.”
US NEWS
McClatchy
Eight years after her infectious call-and-response slogan energized President Barack Obama’s first campaign at a crucial point in the race, Edith Childs will be watching his final State of the Union speech Tuesday up close from the first lady’s box.
The Greenwood, S.C., councilor is known for her “Fired up! Ready to go!” chant that became the unofficial rallying cry of Obama’s 2008 campaign when the road to the White House seemed anything but certain.
Childs, 66, a retired nurse and longtime activist since South Carolina’s civil rights era, first met then-Sen. Obama in Greenwood in 2007. After a late-night flight and drive from Greenville, S.C., the candidate arrived at the town’s civic center on a rainy morning to find a small group of just 38 supporters waiting.
Childs decided the little gathering needed a boost.
Al Jazeera America
CROWN POINT, Indiana — At a gun show on Indiana’s fairgrounds, hundreds of people filed past tables of firearms — World War Two relics, handguns, hunting rifles, and combat-grade automatic weapons — sprinkled with a selection of knives, Nazi artifacts, Confederate flags, dozens of anti-Obama and anti-Islam bumper stickers, and t-shirts with slogans including “Infidel” and “I want YOU to learn English.”
“You got something to sell in that bag, buddy?,” one vendor asked a passerby at the December show. Guns aren’t just for sale — you can trade yours in, and vendors are buying.
Indiana’s gun laws are relatively simple. Federally licensed “brick and mortar” gun dealers are required to perform standard background checks, while vendors selling their “private collections” at gun shows are not. An Indiana resident could walk out of the Crown Point gun show with a legally purchased assault rifle that same day — without a background check — less than an hour from Chicago, where assault rifles are banned. Handguns are subject to different regulations in Indiana.
Indiana’s Republican-controlled government has rolled back firearm regulations in recent years. In July 2015, a new law went into effect that made it legal for residents to own sawed-off shotguns. People typically saw off part of the gun barrel to make a gun more concealable and maneuverable.
The Guardian
On Sunday, dozens of meatpacking workers and their families gathered in a spartan banquet hall in this central Iowa town to discuss ongoing union negotiations with their employer, JBS Swift and Co. As they entered, each received a copy of Hola Iowa, a local paper featuring an interview with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
At the snack tables, where a woman handed out doughnuts, they waited for the meeting to begin, some of them thumbing through the paper. Published in Spanish and English, the first-page editorial urged Latinos to vote in the Iowa’s 1 February caucus.
“In 2016, as Latinos in Iowa, we should make it our duty to participate in this sacred Iowa tradition,” wrote Christian Ucles, the political director of the League of United Latin American Citizens of Iowa (Lulac).
“We have so much to lose if we don’t participate; we have so much to lose if candidates (like Trump) think they can dehumanize and demonize our community all because they don’t fear our voting power.”
The Guardian
As the armed siege of an eastern Oregon wildlife refuge entered its second week, the rightwing militia faced increasing pressure to surrender – including from former supporters of the occupation’s leader.
Ammon Bundy, the Nevada rancher who organized the takeover of the Malheur national wildlife refuge headquarters, avoided reporters all weekend as some of the protesters began to leave the occupation and as local residents and activists who had previously backed Bundy demanded that he and his militiamen retreat.
“We’re gonna figure some way to get him out,” Travis Williams, a 46-year-old Harney County rancher, told the Guardian on Saturday night. Williams had met and collaborated with Bundy last month in advance of a large rally to protest against the prosecution and imprisonment of local cattle ranchers Dwight Hammond and his son, Steven. But he and other local allies of Bundy were shocked when Bundy and fellow out-of-state men hijacked the protests and formed a heavily armed militia that seized a number of buildings at the federal wildlife sanctuary, located 30 miles away from the town of Burns.
Reuters
Seven Republican presidential candidates will participate in Fox Business Network's prime-time debate on Thursday, but Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and former business executive Carly Fiorina did not qualify for the main event, the network said on Monday.
The seven candidates chosen for the main debate by Fox Business, based on the network's polling criteria, were billionaire businessman Donald Trump, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Ohio Governor John Kasich.
The Guardian
The US supreme court on Monday appeared to lean toward striking down a requirement under which public-sector workers who choose not to join a union must still pay fees for collective bargaining – a move that would serve as a major blow to organized labor and could affect millions of workers.
The court’s conservative justices expressed support for overturning a 1977 ruling, Abood v Detroit Board of Education, which deemed the collection of “agency fees” from non-members by public-sector unions constitutional.
Vox
When the White House announced on Friday that it would leave one seat empty in the first lady’s guest box during President Obama's State of the Union address Tuesday, to commemorate the lives lost to gun violence, the move was immediately cast as a partisan play.
Some are showing appreciation for the gesture. On Monday, family members of gun violence victims started using the hashtag #EmptySeat on Twitter to note their own losses, acknowledging that the void the president's gesture tries to address rings true for them.
Perhaps the most high-profile of these tweeters is Nelba Márquez-Greene, the mother of 6-year-old Ana, one of 20 children slain in the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012.
WORLD NEWS
DW News
Germany's Justice Minister Heiko Maas was the latest high-profile politician to speak out about the string of sexual assaults in Cologne on Sunday. In an interview with the popular "Bild am Sonntag" newspaper, Maas voiced his suspicions that the crimes which have the whole country reeling were not the result of an opportunistic mob mentality but a thought-out, planned attack on the city's women.
"No one can tell me that it wasn't coordinated and prepared," the minister said. "My suspicion is that this specific date was picked, and a certain number of people expected. This would again add another dimension [to the crimes]."
The newspaper provided details from official police reports citing the use of social networks by some north African migrant communities to encourage their fellows to join them in the square between the Cologne train station and the cathedral, where the now hundreds of incidents of molestation and pick-pocketing took place.
Al Jazeera America
Aid convoys arranged by local and international organizations have reached the besieged Syrian town of Madaya, where thousands of residents are trapped and people have already begun to die of starvation.
Trucks arrived in the city, near the Lebanese border, as well as at two separate villages in the northwest of the country, tfollowing an agreement between warring sides in Syria.
Rebel-held Madaya has been blockaded for months by pro-government forces prompting aid agencies to warn of widespread starvation.
Abou Ammar, a media activist in Madaya, told Al Jazeera over the phone that local aid organizations have been waiting since early Monday morning for aid to arrive.
“We have all been eagerly waiting since 5am. The situation here is getting worse and it is about time this operation goes through.
“We will work with the aid convoys arriving in Madaya and will help distributing aid to residents in town,” he said.
Spiegel Online
The events in Cologne were perpetrated by a sexist criminal mob -- and have triggered the rise of racist digital mob in response. The incident has shown that much of the public doesn't care much about sexual violence, unless it comes from foreigners.
The "events in Cologne" on New Year's Eve: It is a formulation that takes no time at all to type or, for politicians and functionaries, to speak into a microphone. But doing so is the first mistake. The word "events" seems so passive, so unavoidable. But what happened in Cologne was more than fate, they were violent sexual assaults perpetrated against women by groups of men. And if the numbers and portrayals are true, then one can use a term that is among the ugliest in a societal context: mob.
The Guardian
Behind the drama of the manhunt and the surreal involvement of Sean Penn, the rearrest of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán constitutes a fascinating and important moment for Mexico and the world of narco-traffic. But we cannot yet be sure how and why it is crucial.
There are some certainties: Guzmán is not a mobster, he is a businessman – an astute one – dealing in a commodity upon which our societies are as depressingly dependent as they are on oil: cocaine and other hard drugs, including heroin and methamphetamine. When the financial news reports the current price of an oil barrel or value of bullion, it ought to add the day’s rating for a kilo of pure cocaine, if we are to know what is really going on in the global economy.
Guzmán’s business is assured by the fact that there is no chance of our dependency on drugs abating, any more than there is of our banks being suddenly unwilling to welcome its vast profits.
Just because Wachovia and HSBC got caught – and admitted to – facilitating Guzmán’s cartel business (and may have stopped) means merely that now some other bank is doing so. The whole show goes on and on – and in this regard, Guzmán’s comment to Penn that drug use will continue after his demise is spot-on.
Reuters
An aid convoy entered a besieged Syrian town on Monday where thousands have been trapped without supplies for months and people are reported to have died of starvation.
Trucks carrying food and medical supplies reached Madaya near the Lebanese border and began to distribute aid as part of an agreement between warring sides, the United Nations and the Red Cross said.
Dozens are said to have died from starvation or lack of medical care in the town and activists say some inhabitants have been reduced to eating leaves. Images said to be of emaciated residents have appeared widely on social media.
At the same time, another convoy began entering two Shi'ite villages, al Foua and Kefraya in the northwestern province of Idlib 300 km (200 miles) away. Rebel fighters in military fatigues and with scarves covering their faces inspected the aid vehicles in the rain before they entered.
Reuters
North Korea has developed a nuclear weapons program despite poverty and international sanctions, using home-grown technology and virtually free labor to cut costs, experts said.
South Korean government analysis has put North Korea's nuclear spending at $1.1 billion to $3.2 billion overall, although experts say it is impossible to make an accurate calculation given the secrecy surrounding the program, and estimates vary widely.
However, the weapons that North Korea has tested thus far are comparatively small and based mostly on less sophisticated fission, or atomic bomb, technology.
The isolated North's claim that its fourth and most recent test, conducted last week, was of a more advanced and powerful hydrogen bomb has been widely doubted, although experts said it is possible Pyongyang took the intermediate step of boosting an atomic bomb with hydrogen isotopes.
BBC
Iran has removed the core of its Arak heavy-water nuclear reactor and filled it with cement, according to the country's official news agency Fars.
The fate of the reactor was one of the toughest sticking points in Iran's long nuclear negotiations last year.
Under the terms of the deal, Iran agreed the heavy-water reactor would be reconfigured so it was not capable of yielding material for a nuclear weapon.
The removal of the core is one of the final steps required by the deal.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
Climate Central
It looks like this El Niño — which will rank among the strongest on record — has passed its peak in terms of tropical ocean temperatures, but it’s not going away anytime soon. In fact, the biggest El Niño impacts on the U.S., like rain and snow for California, are probably still to come.
The country has already started to feel the influence of El Niño with a recent spate of storms that dumped much-needed precipitation on California. The cold winter months are when El Niño holds sway over North American weather patterns, generally leading to cooler and wetter weather over the southern tier of the U.S. and warmer and drier conditions over the northern parts of the country and southern Canada.
But while the warm Pacific Ocean waters associated with El Niño tend to peak in temperature in November or December, those U.S. impacts don’t hit their high notes until the January to March period, Michelle L’Heureux, an El Niño forecaster with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said.
Climate Central
It’s a mild and sunny summer day on the tidal salt marshes at Barn Island Wildlife Management Area, which sits across Little Narragansett bay from Stonington, Conn. Walking through a wide, dry stretch of marsh, Chris Elphick, a conservation biologist at the University of Connecticut, focuses a spotting scope on a group of little brown birds hidden among the thigh-high grasses.
Elphick identifies the rare saltmarsh sparrow by the yellow shading on its face and the crisp dark streaks on its breast. Saltmarsh sparrows, which represent the most vulnerable of many species that call this habitat home, make their nests in the high marsh among stems of saltmeadow cordgrass, escaping the twice-daily tides that flood the lower marsh. But the Barn Island high marsh and others like it are disappearing as the rising ocean brings salty tides farther inland. Elphick gives the rare sparrow 30 to 40 years before it disappears from the planet.
Al Jazeera America
CHINTALAVEEDHI, India — It has been two years since Rathnalamma Raasa died, and her family still doesn’t know what killed her.
What started as a fever quickly left Raasa, 25, unable to eat or move. Medicines the local health clinic prescribed drained the family’s meager savings but provided no relief. She was unconscious by the time her husband borrowed enough money to visit a government hospital in Visakhapatnam, the nearest city, where doctors said her real illness had gone undetected: falciparum malaria, a parasitic disease that, without timely treatment, had spread to her brain.
She died at the hospital two days later, in August 2013, but the confusion didn’t end there. Her official record lists the cause of death as “cardiorespiratory failure,” a catchall term that means her heart and lungs ceased to function. It doesn't once mention malaria.
NPR
People who take certain popular medicines for heartburn, indigestion and acid reflux may want to proceed more cautiously, researchers reported Monday.
The drugs, known as proton-pump inhibitors (PPIs), appear to significantly elevate the chances of developing chronic kidney disease, according to a study involving more than 250,000 people.
An estimated 15 million Americans use PPIs, which are sold by prescription and over-the-counter under a variety of brand names, including Nexium, Prilosec and Prevacid.
"They're very, very common medications," says Morgan Grams, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health who led the research, being published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
NPR
Lower-back pain is very democratic in the people it strikes.
"It's a universal experience. You'd be a really uncommon person never to have had an episode of back pain," says Chris Maher, a physical therapist turned health researcher at the University of Sydney in Australia. "It's a common problem across the whole of the globe," he says, whether it's North America, sub-Saharan Africa or rural India.
Bouts of low-back pain can last between days and years, and frequently hit again.
All sorts of gizmos and treatments exist to alleviate the pain, from ergonomic chairs to special shoe inserts and Velcro back belts. According to Maher's research, those don't seem to do squat to prevent it.
NPR
When Jack O'Connor was 19, he was so desperate to beat his addictions to alcohol and opioids that he took a really rash step. He joined the Marines.
"This will fix me," O'Connor thought as he went to boot camp. "It better fix me or I'm screwed."
After 13 weeks of sobriety and exercise and discipline, O'Connor completed basic training, but he started using again immediately.
"Same thing," he says. "Percocet, like, off the street. Pills."
Percocet is the brand name for acetaminophen and oxycodone. Oxycodone is a powerful opioid. It's one of the most commonly prescribed painkillers, and is a key factor in one of the country's most pressing public health problems — an opioid addiction epidemic. It is a crisis that started, in part, from the overprescription of painkillers like Percocet, and then shifted to heroin as people addicted to prescription drugs looked for a cheaper high.
The Guardian
Giant melting icebergs may be a symbol of climate change but new research has revealed that the plumes of nutrient-rich waters they leave in their wake lead to millions of tonnes of carbon being trapped each year.
Researchers examined 175 satellite photos of giant icebergs in the Southern Ocean which surrounds Antarctica and discovered green plumes stretching up to 1,000km behind them. The greener colour of the plumes is due to blooms of phytoplankton, which thrive on the iron and other nutrients shed by the icebergs.
When these tiny algae - or the many creatures that eat them - die, they fall to the bottom of the ocean. This takes the carbon dioxide they have absorbed from the ocean surface and buries it deep below, thereby curbing the CO2 in the atmosphere and the global warming it causes.
ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Reuters
The U.S. capital's George Washington University is rescinding comedian Bill Cosby's honorary doctorate because of the allegations of sexual assault against him, its president said on Monday.
The Washington college's practice has been not to pull a degree because of information that surfaced after it was awarded, but the allegations have distressed alumni and students who have been sexually assaulted, President Steven Knapp said.
"I have therefore decided that the university will rescind Mr. Cosby’s honorary degree," he said in a statement on the school's website.
Cosby, 78, who personified the model family man in his hit 1980s television series "The Cosby Show," was charged in Pennsylvania last month with sexually assaulting a woman after plying her with drugs and alcohol in 2004.
Cosby and his lawyers have acknowledged marital infidelity on his part but have denied any allegations of sexual misconduct.
NPR
The most prestigious prizes in American children's books were given out this morning: the John Newbery Medal for literature and the Randolph Caldecott Medal for illustration.
Matt de la Peña becomes the first Hispanic author to win the Newbery, for his book Last Stop on Market Street, illustrated by Christian Robinson. It's the story of a young boy riding the city bus with his grandmother, and wondering why their family doesn't have a car.
”I grew up in a very working-class neighborhood right down by the border in San Diego in a town called National City," de la Peña told Morning Edition in February. "We never had quite enough, but we made it work. And I think my goal with everything I write — you know, picture books, novels — is to kind of show the grace and dignity on the, quote, unquote, wrong side of the tracks.
New York Times (Jan. 6, 2016)
Instability and ambiguity are the only constants on David Bowie’s “Blackstar,” the strange, daring, ultimately rewarding album he releases this week on his 69th birthday. It’s at once emotive and cryptic, structured and spontaneous and, above all, willful, refusing to cater to the expectations of radio stations or fans. The closest thing it offers as an explanation of its message is the title of its finale: “I Can’t Give Everything Away.”